Links in Tweets

gga

There is currently some discussion about the dangers of URL
shorteners. Joshua
Schachter
points out that shortened URLs damage the web - the ‘hypertext as
engine of application state’ part of it. David
Weiss
points out the security concerns - phishing and a single compromisable
point.

In this conversation most people point out that URL shorteners have
proliferated because of the popularity of
Twitter. Kottke
has now proposed that Twitter run a URL shortener of their own. Which
seems eminently sensible, given the current state.

I’ve got a different suggestion: Twitter should actually let me use
the <a> anchor tag in my tweets. Just like I’ve been doing in HTML
for as long as the web has been around. That is, the URL in your tweet
should not contribute to the number of characters in your tweet, and
it should also not be visible. Instead it should be attached to a
word, phrase or perhaps the entire tweet. This should be optional:
without markup URLs pasted into tweets should maintain the status quo.

Of course, no other forms of HTML markup should be supported: linking
would be enough. The Twitter web site and desktop and custom phone
clients would have no problem rendering a link. Only SMS clients would
have a problem, and for these perhaps the fallback is to shorten the
URL using Twitter’s own URL shortener and insert that into the
tweet. SMS clients may not be that
common for
much longer.

Assuming Twitter allows specific parts of the tweet to be marked up,
then I suggest
Markdown syntax for
the link. This recent
tweet would have been
typed out as:

I unplugged every landline phone in our office
because of [marketers](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/04/poisoning-the-well.html) (via @misswired)

Of course allowing link markup like this is going to be very popular
with spammers. Two counters:

Twitter should include rel="nofollow" on links when rendering
— as they already do.

Don’t allow targeted markup like this, instead allow the entire
Tweet to be marked up — only one link per tweet. The
disadvantage with this is that sometimes I want more than one link,
and the appropriate rendering is not obvious.

Both targeted markup and one-link-per-tweet have advantages and
disadvantages, I’ll leave it up to Twitter to choose between them. But
please, give me back my <a> anchors.